Recently, the altering life style in the modern society results in the switch of dietary habits from meals at home to eating out. The long-term eating out causes the unbalanced food intakes including decreased vegetables intake and increased meats intake. Despite the unbalanced nutrition intakes, the altered dietary habit also causes obesity and metabolic diseases resulted from the excessive oil, sugar and salt in the foods. Obesity not only affects the beautiful outside, but also results in some physiological abnormalities that lead to increased incidence of noninfectious diseases and elevated lethal rate. For example, fatty liver is caused by the accumulation of excessive hepatic lipid that abolishes the normal lipid metabolism in liver. The abnormal accumulation of excessive lipid in liver would further directly or indirectly lead to the occurrence of type II diabetes that severely damage the life quality of patients.
Furthermore, fatty liver is diagnosed while the weight of hepatic lipid is more than 10% of the total weight of liver. The patient with mild fatty liver exhibits no obverts damage to the health. However, the long-term fatty infiltration of the liver could cause chronic hepatic inflammation that increases the risk of hepatic diseases such as liver cirrhosis and hepatoma. In addition, the decreased synthesis of HDL (high density lipoprotein) and increased synthesis LDL (low density lipoprotein) and very low-density lipoprotein in the fatty liver patient would further result in hyperlipidemia that elevates the incidence of stroke and heart disease.
Diabetes is the one of the most common chronic disease and is usually ignored by the patients due to the mild symptom at early stage of the disease progression. However, the diabetes would cause many chronic complications including renal diseases, retinal disorder, elevated risk of arteriosclerosis and progressed cardiovascular diseases. Moreover, the statistic data show that there are approximately half of fatty liver patients combining with the occurrence of diabetes. In the other hand, almost half of diabetes patients are diagnosed with the fatty liver. The association of fatty liver and diabetes in the clinical is resulted from synthesis and accumulation of hepatic triacylglycerol that is induced by the hyperinsulinemia and insulin resistant in the obese diabetes patients. Currently, there is no applied drug for completely curing both diseases resulted from the lipid accumulation in liver. However, the appropriated pharmaceutical treatment with good living habits is the only way to control and prevent the progression of both diseases.
In order to improve the side effects resulted from the chemical drug on people who have the modern health concepts, the medical plants such as Dendrobium species are investigated for the applications in the recent years. The genus Dendrobium belongs to familia Orchidaceae and distributes in tropical and subtropical area. The members of genus Dendrobium are usually applied to the uses as cut flowers and potted orchids for ornament. Including 15 species distributing in Taiwan, there are 1600 species in the genus Dendrobium in the worldwide. Either dry or fresh stem of genus Dendrobium is a precious Chinese herb named as Dendrobium spp. (Herba Dendrobii) that is widely used in traditional chinese-medicine to bring down a fever, cure the ophthalmology diseases or other nourishing purpose. According to the recent studies, the genus Dendrobium contains many bioactive substances such as phenanthrenes, bibenzyls, fluorenones, sesquiterpenes and alkaloids. These substances exhibit different bio-activities such as anti-inflammatory, anti-oxidant and anti-allergic activities.
Collectively the genus Dendrobium is a healthy and precious pharmaceutical plant. However, the application of genus Dendrobium in the management of hepatic diseases and diabetes is never claimed. Therefore, the inventors of the invention participate in the investigations of the bioactive substances in the genus Dendrobium on improvement of the diabetes or hepatic diseases.